research tool

 

https://www.semanticscholar.org/

Poetic Realism

 

Poetic Realism

In American theater naturalism is generally accepted as the de facto One True Theater. How deep this prejudice runs is often surprising but always painful. Consider the career of Tennessee Williams. Known for two of the most famous plays in American theater, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he was acclaimed in 1962 as “the man who is the greatest living playwright in the Western world” by Time magazine. Within seven years, that same magazine was putting him on the front cover with the headline “Played Out?” and in their sister magazine, Life, Stefan Kanfer was accusing the playwright of infantile regression. His later plays were, with the possible exception of Small Craft Warnings, critical and commercial disasters.

What happened in those seven years to take Williams’ reputation from zenith to nadir so swiftly was that his plays began to abandon all pretense of naturalism–or, as people like to call it “realism.”  Tennessee Williams built his reputation on works that critics and audiences regularly called “lyrical” and “poetic” yet always, above all, “realistic.” To turn away from realism was seen as the greatest heresy. The later plays of Williams, by which critics mean anything after Night of the Iguana, are primarily non-realistic. Therefore by conventional wisdom they are disastrous.

Witness Walter Kerr writing a personal letter to Williams to warn him against ever leaving the sacred grove of realism:

What worries me about Camino Real is not what you want to say but the direction in which you, as an artist, are moving. You’re heading toward the cerebral; don’t do it. What makes you an artist of the first rank is your intuitive gift for penetrating reality, without junking reality in the process; an intuitive artist starts with the recognizable surface of things and burrows in. Don’t swap this for the conscious, rational processes of the analyst, the symbolist, the abstract thinker.

In other words: don’t dare give us your thoughts, give us your illusions. We love superficial resemblances and above all we love recognizability. This calls to mind George Jean Nathan’s elegant quip that realism is the doctrine that what you already know (“the recognizable surface of things”) is inherently superior to what you don’t (analysis, symbols, abstraction).

Now Walter Kerr is of course one of the greatest Philistines in theater history but even more sensitive critics than he have offered the same caution. Brooks Atkinson, Robert Brustein, Richard Gilman have all said similar things. Their consensus at the time, which remains largely the consensus today, is that Williams is one of the finest writers of dramatic prose, gifted with an ear for the poetry of realistic dialogue–and he should stick to realism.

Yet poetry is not realistic. Poetry relies upon symbols and where it does not draw on symbols, it creates them. As a poet himself, Williams knew this. In truth even Williams’ earlier plays often skew away from realism toward the conscious and the symbolist. Even the supposed realism of Streetcar wraps up ever so deftly with one of the dumbest bits of symbolism in modern theater. It is these symbolist moments that people find “lyrical” or “poetic” about much of Williams’ drama, but those symbols exist simultaneously alongside a nominal realism. The later plays abandon this formula. They dance on a permeable border between realism and non-realism, and often step (as Camino Real does) completely over the line.

http://www.seattlestar.net/2012/07/poetic-realism-vs-realistic-poetry-suddenly-last-summer/

see also, “Poetic Realism” in A Streetcar Named Desire

Streetcar Speech

Speech in A Streetcar Named Desire

Williams uses speech to set the characters in their class context and show the differences of social status and education as well as of character. The differences between Stanley and Blanche are stressed by Stanley’s non-grammatical, coarse, often slangy speech as against Blanche’s high-flown rhetoric which often rings false (as it is meant to), and never lets us forget that she was a teacher of English. At times there is a lyrical quality in her words, emphasising their emotional Content.

When Blanche is moved, she frequently uses figurative language, as befits a teacher of English. So for instance we find in Scene 5 ‘Have got to be seductive — put on soft colours, the colours of butterfly wings, and glow’; in Scene 6 she describes love’ as being like ‘a blinding light on something that had always been half in shadow’; and in Scene 10 she speaks of the paddy-wagon picking up drunken soldiers ‘like daisies’.

‘While from Blanche such figurative language is to be expected, surprisingly we find Stanley too using metaphors when he is moved. His phrase the ‘coloured lights’ used twice in Scene 8 to describe the ecstasy of passion is startling and evocative, as is his contemptuous description of Blanche’s evening gown and tiara as ‘that worn-out Mardi Gras outfit, rented for fifty cents from some rag-picker’ (Scene 10).

Stella, like Blanche, speaks correct English, but in a matter-of-fact, mostly unemotional tone, except when she speaks of her love for her husband. Eunice and Steve are set firmly a rung or two below Stanley on the class ladder, again by their use of language as much as by their drunken public quarrels. Mitch too is defined by the way he speaks: his efforts at speaking properly are marred by grammatical slip-ups as much as by his genteel circumlocutions (‘I perspire’, never ‘I sweat’). He cannot follow or match Blanche’s flights of fancy, and is acutely aware of this.

http://mrhoyesibwebsite.com/Drama%20Texts/Streetcar/Useful%20Info/Speech.htm

phrases and clauses n stuff

Phrase

 Merriam-Webster.com

: a word or group of words forming a syntactic constituent with a single grammatical functionan adverbial phrase
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A phrase is a group of words without a verb that explain/expand/give more meaning to something in a sentence (modify)
ClauseMerriam-Webster.com

: a group of words containing a subject and predicate and functioning as a member of a complex (see COMPLEX entry 2 sense 1b(2)) or compound (see COMPOUND entry 2 sense 3b) sentenceThe sentence "When it rained they went inside" consists of two clauses: "when it rained" and "they went inside." 
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Compound
Merriam-Webster.com
of a sentence : having two or more main clauses
Complex 
Merriam-Webster.com
of a sentence : consisting of a main clause and one or more subordinate clauses
Subordinate Clause
: of, relating to, or constituting a clause that functions as a noun, adjective, or adverb
Complex sentences
simple, compound, and complex sentences

the big picture

 

Internal Oral

 From the guide:

Internal assessment: Individual oral (15 minutes)

This component consists of an individual oral which is internally assessed by the teacher and externally moderated by the IB at the end of the course.

Individual oral (15 minutes)

Supported by an extract from both one non-literary body of work and one from a literary work, students will offer a prepared response of 10 minutes, followed by 5 minutes of questions by the teacher, to the following prompt:

Examine the ways in which the global issue of your choice is presented through the content and form of one of the works and one of the bodies of work that you have studied. (40 marks)

Aristotle...